Sixty years of ethnic cleansing

During the second world war the occupation forces set about the extermination of hundreds of thousands of Jews and Gypsies - and also of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Half a century later the dismantling of Yugoslavia sparked new massacres in which each community has been both victim and executioner.

“From April until autumn the Kosovo countryside was being burned and looted... I was there. The fires and the looting continued through to mid-October. I shall never forget the terrible sight that met my eyes on 18 October. I was coming down from the mountains of the upper Ibar valley and I saw a long and wretched column of Montenegrin Serb refugees. They were coming to find refuge in the town, bringing with them the few possessions they had managed to save, loaded into wagons and handcarts or carried in bundles on their shoulders.”

That account could have come from one of the OSCE observers (Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe). In fact it dates from 1941. It is an extract from a “Report on the Yugoslav Countryside” by an Italian agronomist, Giovanni Lorenzoni (1). It is another way of saying that ethnic cleansing has a long history in former Yugoslavia. As Slobodan Milosevic subjects the Albanians of Kosovo (80% of the population according to the 1991 census) to forced exile and ethnic cleansing, many Serbs see this as a fitting revenge: partly for the bombing of Serbia by Nato, but also for the “cleansing” to which they themselves were subjected in the past.

During the second world war the fascist and Nazi occupation forces dismantled Yugoslavia. They set up puppet states headed by fascist dictators - Ante Pavelic in Croatia, Milan Nedic in Serbia - and annexed the other parts (2): Italy turned Montenegro into a protectorate and annexed part of Slovenia, most of the Dalmatian islands and part of Croatia. Germany appropriated most of Slovenia. Hungary took another slice of Slovenia and most of Vojvodina. Bulgaria took almost the whole of Macedonia. Kosovo and Western Macedonia were annexed to “Greater Albania”, under Italian control. In each of these annexed regions terrorist methods were used to put a German, Italian, Hungarian or Bulgarian stamp on them.

(3) Report by US Under Secretary of State Stuart Eizenstat: US and Allied Wartime and Postwar Relations and Negotiations with Argentina, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey on Looted Gold and German External Assets and US Concerns about the Fate of the Wartime Ustasha Treasury, ed. William Slany, Washington DC, June 1998.

(4) After the Liberation the city was run by the Allied Military Government. When this was abolished in 1953 the Allies unilaterally handed Trieste over to Italy, thus creating major tensions with Belgrade. Rome went so far as to mass military divisions on the Yugoslav frontier. The fear of war led many inhabitants to flee.

(5) The bombing did not spare even the former extermination camp at Jasenovac.